I used to love the Fourth of July.
I would wake up early and change into beat up clothes
because I knew I would soon be covered in firecracker residue,
and our roman candle wars always scuffed up anything new.
Out in the shed I kept my own box full of them.
I used to keep it in the basement, but one year it erupted and singed the carpet.
I was grounded for a month.

Growing up near the city meant that all the best fireworks were outlawed.
You’d have to drive about an hour before shady shops would sell you half sticks of dynamite.
In the afternoon we would go out to the desert and blow up old tvs and microwaves.
Once the daylight waned we hurried back for the big show:
thousand dollar munitions shot up at lightning velocity,
their echoes shimmying down the sky,
lighting up my gaze.

When I joined the Army we didn’t exactly celebrate it the same way.
My battalion had been called up to Iraq just before the fourth in ‘03.
Barely even had time to unpack my bags before my squadmates were out on the range,
decimating old humvees and munitions.
Will had some surplus grenades that he was chucking over.
Manny convinced the guys over at Depot to let him borrow a grenade launcher.
At night the colonel gathered us all to watch captured IEDs blow up some technicals.
It was a “learning experience,” he called it.
It was the single most incredible display of crude pyrotechnics I had ever seen.
All those Independance Days back home didn’t even come close.

Similar IEDs ended up killing Manny and Will later that year.

Nowadays I stay home on the Fourth of July.